Educating the Healthcare Consumer

There are over 1000 startups just focusing on Healthcare in India and we see more and more coming up each day. If you look at the pattern of the startups, predominantly we see competitive startup’s. There is one person who is wanting to solve a problem and they are many others following the trend but with an additional feature or functionality. Consider finding Doctors as a pain point. There are few early adopters like Practo, but over the last eight years, there are more than 50 startups in the same space offering similar services. The next thing what happened is the startups have diversified to different cities becoming first in their city. Competition is good, the consumer gets to taste more convenience and functionality. But what should not happen is withdrawal from using technology.

The key area what we need to focus is to streamline the problem-solving abilities and diversify the solution offerings based on the regional requirement. One solution does not fit all.

Consumer education plays a very vital role in building a successful startup and solving a problem. The key aspect of Consumer education is to reach out to the end user and help them utilize services available and for this, education should start at the ground level. Reaching out and working with NGO’s who work with varied population, partnering with Primary Health Centers, organizing educative seminars and workshops at meeting points (Panchayat meetings, Locality meetings etc.) will go a long way.